The following abbreviations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to within the following description about at least the prior art and/or the present invention.
BSC Base Station Controller
CS Circuit Switched
GSM Global System for Mobile Communications
M2M Machine to Machine
PS Packet Switched
RBS Radio Base Station
VSAT Very Small Aperture Terminal
Transport vessels and cruise liners communicate to land based telecommunication systems via satellite links. To obtain near global communication coverage for the transport vessels and cruise liners requires the use of multiple satellites each of which have a satellite region in which there is provided telecommunication services to the transport vessels and cruise liners that are located in the respective satellite region. In practice, a maritime company (e.g., Maersk) will typically purchase the minimal amount of satellite bandwidth which is required to support an estimated number of their transport vessels per satellite region. Then, the acquired regional satellite bandwidth for the given satellite region is shared amongst all of the maritime company's vessels even if all of the maritime company's vessels are currently not located within the given satellite region. This particular situation has undesirable drawbacks as will be explained in more detail next.
The vessels today currently deploy GSM cellular technologies to provide both voice and M2M data communications. In particular, each vessel is equipped with a GSM RBS which communicates with a land-based BSC using the satellite link as a backhaul transport. However, the current GSM RBSs on the vessels contain static configurations that must be defined to fulfill the transport bandwidth requirements when all of the vessels are assumed to be active in a given satellite region. This means that the GSM RBS on each vessel must be configured to generate a maximum bandwidth such that the sum of all individual GSM RBS's currently located within a particular satellite region do not exceed the amount of bandwidth dimensioned for that specific satellite region.
Thus, when all vessels are active within a satellite region, each vessel is allocated a minimal amount of bandwidth. During this time the GSM access solution would be configured to provide limited voice and data capabilities utilizing only the limited amount of transport bandwidth. However, there will be many times when the active number of vessels within a satellite region is much less than the maximum supported number of vessels. In this situation, there will be additional transport bandwidth available to be shared amongst the active vessels, thus allowing for an increased level of GSM voice and data capabilities. However, since the GSM RBS configurations are static these additional GSM voice and data capabilities cannot currently be recognized. Accordingly, there has been and is a need to address this shortcoming and other shortcomings associated with the static configuration of the GSM RBSs located on vessels. This need and other needs are satisfied by the present invention.